Cogito, ergo spamEventually, the problem of spam arises on all message boards, and I've seen all sorts of approaches to deal with it, but no one method which outshines them all: there are advantages and disadvantages to every plan, and you have to tailor your solution to the sort of board that you have, and the sort of board that you want. On fanhost.com, for instance, the admins noticed that posters were posting spam just to bump up their post count. Assuming that posters were rational agents, they reset everyone's post count. However, this had absolutely no effect on the spam, and three of the site's top posters left in dudgeon of debatable altitude. The spam continues. Perhaps eliminating the post count altogether would have been better, but that's just my conjecture. On thescifi.com, they had a special forum for spam, and this seemed to work at keeping the other forums on-topic. If any thread on any other forum became over-run with spam, it got moved to the spam forum. However, it had the unpredictable consequence of killing the other "themed" forums, as all the "cool" regular posters gathered in the spam forum, and all the other posters (even, ironically, the ones complaining loudest about said spam) want to read what the "cool" posters are talking about. On theotherzone.com, the admins rather cleverly just removed the post counts from the view of the posters, without deleting them altogether. This meant that posters could retain their rankings without getting panicked about their precise position in the order. Sometimes the answer is hidden in the question. On djtaz.com, the General forum started getting gummed up with spam. However, there were still twenty other perfectly serviceable forums that people could post on, and pretty much all the posts made in Religion, Politics and Debates (I'm using these as examples because I was familiar with them) were on-topic even in the middle of the maelstrom. Posters who found the spam disagreeable could have got involved in any of those wonderful threads and forums at any time, but chose not to, for reasons not entirely clear to me even now. They preferred to monitor the inane babblings conducted in part by myself in the General forum. There was even a curious case of a poster whose only contributions seemed to be complaining about spam. This qualifies as a rare sighting of irony in the wild. In fact, there is only one proven way to kick spam up the arse, and that is for the posters complaining about that spam to make some quality posts. For the record, complaining about other posters being more prolific than you does not count as "quality posts". Solo1's Definition Circus
For instance, "I agree with solo1" is relevant, but witless and it really adds nothing to the thread, so it's two-thirds spam. If you want to see some examples of relevant, witty posts which add something, go to theotherzone.com and see any of my posts in the Religion or Politics forums. If you want to see some good examples of spam posts, go to theotherzone.com and check out any of my posts in the General forum. Email SpamEmail spam is a different horse altogether - this is when people you don't know keep sending you offers for things you don't want. It's the online equivalent of junk mail, and because of the sheer volume, it's even more annoying. There are, again, many ways to combat this email spam, but the best way is still setting up email filters with known addresses and codewords (my advice is to start with "Viagra") to be automatically deleted from the server. Update October 2007: I have Vista installed on my new laptop and its pre-programmed junk e-mail filter really works. It's letting through about one spam message in every fifty, which is a very good hit rate for any programme. I'm impressed. Every so often some bright spark will think of a sure-fire way to stop spam dead in its tracks. What that spark fails to appreciate is that his idea is not new. Lots of people have tried all sorts of things to stop spam, and nothing is waterproof. For instance, setting a filter on the word "Viagra", as I recommended above, will also stop legitimate emails from friends which just happen to mention Viagra. Are you one of these bright sparks? Do you have an idea that will definitely stop the spam problem? If so, read on, and tick the boxes accordingly. If not, you have reached the bottom of the page. Thank you.
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